Since this is the most important part of the game it's good that it is working as well as it is. The rest of the game falls into placement of assets and scripting. I do have some turret logic to complete for capital ships and fighters that have turrets.

Although hit detection is present it currently does not damage anything. This is because each component on a ship can be different and they are not yet defined. Once this is complete I can then send a message to damage a component.

Most of it will fall into scripting to keep as much logic as possible out of the engine. The engine will handle the combat AI but the scripting will be able to control this to some degree as well.

Ships can fly along any axis. The entire game is 3D. When combat is to the point you can actually play I'll put it up on a server for people to try out. It probably will not have the components and will use a standard value for hull and shields but it should demo what the game is about.

My previous hang ups with the game were the assets and textures. However my goal now is to get it functional and then pretty it up later. And ideally if I've designed my pieces correctly this should not be difficult later and should amount to loading a binary file to bring in all the assets and scripting. My goal is that with a different script you would essentially have a different story line while still maintaining the 4x space genre throughout.

I worked on the ship to ship combat first because if it sucks or doesn't work I really don't have a game at all. The good thing is I'm not sacrificing design to gain functionality. The engine is basically a bunch of DLLs and is quite modularized. I would like to maintain good design but not get so hung up on it that I have no functionality. Likewise I don't want functionality to precede good design b/c then it becomes unmanageable.